Tuesday, 30 July 2013

Alan
Sorrenti is an artist from Naples who was born to an Italian father
and a Welsh mother. In 1972 he released an interesting debut
“prog-style” album, “Aria” (Air), on the label Harvest. This
work is an excellent effort to blend acoustic and dreamy atmospheres
with experimental sounds and vocal acrobatics. The most evident
source of inspiration here is Tim Buckley but in this work the
Neapolitan artist, helped by some excellent musicians as Tony
Esposito (drums percussion), Vittorio Nazzaro (bass, classical
guitar) and Albert Prince (piano, organ, bandoneon, mellotron,
synthesizers) managed to shape a particular, original sound that is
really worth listening to.

The
opener is the long, complex, claustrophobic title track... “Air,
I’m looking for you in every corner of my room / Air, I’m running
after you in the labyrinths of my mind... Air, I feel I’m losing
you...”. The voice is used as an instrument to draw surrealistic
poetry while calm, reflective moments are counter-pointed to almost
hysterical, frenzied passages... For almost twenty minutes the music
flows away with sudden changes in rhythm and colourful melodic lines
run one after each other. The track is enriched by the violin of the
special guest Jean Luc Ponty...

The
second track “Vorrei incontrarti” (I would like to meet you) is
my favourite. It’s a dreamy acoustic ballad, almost mystical. It
expresses the desire to follow something so beautiful that it seems
unreal, an illusion, a spell or a siren singing... “I would like to
meet you / Outside the gates of a factory / I would like to meet you
/ Along the streets leading to India / I would like to meet you / But
I don’t know what I would do / Perhaps I would cry with joy... Sing
your song, sing it for me / Maybe one day I will sing for you...”.

“La
mia mente” (My mind) is a melancholic ballad where vocal
experiments and dissonant piano chords soar from an acoustic strummed
guitar background... “My mind is a balloon / Wandering in a soft
dream / And it doesn’t come back to earth / My people show it / My
people shoot at it / The first hit make it shake / The second one
shoots it down...”. In some moments Alan Sorrenti here reminds me
of Area’s singer Demetrio Stratos.

The
final track “Un fiume tranquillo” (A quiet river) is another
long, particular ballad. The lyrics deal with the fear of
self-destruction while the music flows like “a quiet river erasing
the memories”, a “quiet river that can save you from a violent
fall...”.